IF ART GALLERY, 1223 LINCOLN STREET, COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, SHOWS CONTEMPORARY ART BY ARTISTS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE IF ART GALLERY IS OWNED AND OPERATED BY WIM ROEFS. CONTACT THE GALLERY AT WROEFS@SC.RR.COM OR 803-238-2351.

One of Columbia’s finest restaurants, Rosso
Trattoria Italia at Trenholm Plaza, presents with if ART Gallery a body of work
by Dutch painter Kees Salentijn, who is represented by if ART. The reception
for the exhibition, now on view, is Monday, April 14, 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.

Amsterdam
native and resident Salentijn (b. 1947) is among The Netherlands’ most
prominent painters. The initial inspiration leading to his mature style came
from post-war American art and from Spanish painters such as Tapies, Antonio
Saura, and later Millares. Salentijn developed a personal style that combined
the expressionist, painterly swath with smaller but equally expressionist marks
that are quick and slightly nervous but sure. Combining vigorous painting with
often-childlike imagery, Salentijn’s work eventually placed him in the Northern
European, post-war CoBrA tradition of strongly expressionist, abstracted art
that containes representational elements. Salentijn’s increased use of
figuration in the 1990s confirmed this link. His work is in several European
museums. In addition to the 1982 Chicago Art Fair, his work has been
represented at major European art fairs, including Art Fair Basel, TEFAF
Maastricht, Kunstmesse Cologne and KunstRAI Amsterdam.

if ART Gallery artist Phil Garrett did his undergraduate work at the University of South Carolina and the
Honolulu Academy, studying with the late Gabor Peterdi. He received his BFA at the
San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 and lived and worked in the Bay Area until 1979,
when he returned to South Carolina, where he presently resides in Greenville.
Garrett founded King Snake Press in 1998 for the production and promotion of monotypes
and has worked with numerous artists from the region and elsewhere.
His work, which includes works on paper and paintings, are in public collections
including the South Carolina State Museum, State of Hawaii, Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, and corporate and private collections in the USA, Europe, and Japan. He is
represented by if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC.
Garrett has completed numerous artist residences and taught painting and printmaking in
venues across the USA, including The Penland School of Craft. He joined the Golden
Acrylic Working Artists Program in 1999 and has lectured and taught acrylic painting in
the USA, Japan, and Belgium.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The
X shape on its side – a horizontal cross of St. Andrew – first appeared
prominently in Leo Twiggs’ work around 1970, with stars, in his depiction of
the Confederate flag. The X reappeared in the same capacity in the mid-1990s, when
a high-pitched hate-versus-heritage debate in Twiggs’ home state, South
Carolina, focused on that flag flying on top of the capitol. Twiggs has
continued to use the flag image in different contexts, forms, shapes and
colors, including white, to trigger debates about Southern heritage. He is
preparing a 2015 exhibition of flags for the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of
Art.

Twiggs’
X, however, evolved beyond that flag. When revisiting the flag theme, he also
began to paint the cross without the stars. As he did, the shape reminded him
of the railroad crossings of the rural South, which resulted, around 2000, in
the start of a new series, Silent
Crossing. Railroads split towns, with wrong and presumably right sides.
They segregated towns figuratively and, when a slow freight train came through,
literally, but also provided a way out for Southern blacks. The crossing became
Twiggs’ symbol for the need “to cross over,” as he put it, perhaps at the
intersection of different cultures and values, as people seek to overcome
differences, including those involving race and that flag.

The
cross took on yet another meaning when Twiggs began his Targeted Man series in the mid-2000s. X now marked the spot,
typically on or near figures singled out as targets or already eliminated. It
symbolized the shadow that has hovered over African Americans forever but after
9/11 also intimidated other Americans as the country at large felt targeted and
stalked.

Twiggs’
cross of St. Andrews is indicative of how he has used forms, shapes and symbols
for years, even decades, but in the process has inserted them with new meaning,
life and narrative roles. The Silent
Crossing series also featured red dots as the red lights over the railroad
crossing sign. But already within that series, the dots became, too, the bull’s
eye of a target. In the Targeted Man
series, even more so than the X mark, the dot and full target are the dominant
visual element, along with the figure under assault.

Twiggs’ cows, also regulars, stand for rural living but also for
“docile helplessness,” as he calls it, “the condition of most under-classes in
a capitalist environment.” Two of Twiggs’ male figures – both bulky, with hat
but few features, one en profile, the
other frontal or from the back – populate many of his paintings, taking on a
variety of roles. Between them, they depict black ancestral or father figures; a
comforting or ominous presence; men of undetermined race leaving or going to
the red house; targeted black men or targeted white men; men singing the blues
or causing them.

Repositioning
similar shapes, forms, figures and objects physically, aesthetically, conceptually
and in relation to each other is one way in which Twiggs creates consistency
within in a varied body of work. The approach has resulted in a recognizable
visual vocabulary that allows the work to remain familiar while staying fresh,
creating a range of symbolic narratives much wider than Twiggs’ modest cast of
characters would suggest. The approach also has contributed to the ambiguity
that Twiggs inserts into his paintings, leaving meaning up for debate even as
the issues in question are clear. And so Figure
And Flag of 2014 shows that flag flying over a figure, black or white,
saluting him or taunting him or leaving him wearily indifferent.

Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery

Orangeburg,
S.C., resident Leo Twiggs (1934) is among South Carolina’s most revered and
important artists, arts educators and arts administrators of the past 50 years.
In 1980, he became the first visual artist to receive South Carolina’s
Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts. His 2004 career retrospective, accompanied by a catalogue, opened at
the Georgia Museum of Art and traveled to the Gibbes Museum in Charleston,
S.C., the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Delta Fine Arts Center in
Winston Salem, N.C., and the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. Twiggs
has had more than 70 solo exhibitions, the largest being Civil/Uncivil: The Art Of Leo Twiggs at
the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C., in 2011. His work was
selected for the South Carolina State Museum’s 1999 millennium exhibition 100
Years, 100 Artists. Among the many
other places where Twiggs has exhibited are New York City’s Studio
Museum in Harlem; the Schenectady (N.Y.) Museum; the Palazzo Venezia in Rome,
Italy; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca N.Y.; the
Mississippi Museum of Art; and the American Crafts Museum in New York. Twiggs’
1997 exhibition, Commemoration Revisited, a return to paintings of tattered images of Confederate flags 25
years earlier,received national attention. Already during the 1970s, his work
was included in several national exhibitions representing a who’s who of
African-American art.

Twiggs’
career and body of work is extensively documented in the 320-page, heavily
illustrated, 2011 book Messages From
Home: The Art Of Leo Twiggs (Orangeburg, SC: Claflin University Press). He
is featured in dozens of books, articles and other publications, including
Elton Fax’s 1977 book Black Artists of
the New Generation; the Studio Museum’s 1978 catalogue Leo Twiggs: Down HomeLandscape;
Samella Lewis’ 1990 book African American
Arts and Artists; Amalia K. Amaki’s A
Century of African American Art, 2004; and the 2006 if ART catalogue Leo Twiggs: Toward Another Retrospective.

Twiggs
was born in 1934 in St. Stephen, S.C.In 1956, he received his B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Claflin University in
Orangeburg, S.C. In 1961, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1964
earned his MA from New York University, and in 1971was the first
African-American to receive a doctorate in art education from the University of
Georgia. Formerly a distinguished professor of art and executive director of
the I.P. Stanback Museum and Planetarium at South Carolina State University in
Orangeburg, S.C., Twiggs is S.C. State professor emeritus and distinguished
artist-in-residence at Claflin University.

Quitman MarshallYou Were Born One TimeNinety-Six Press, Furman University (Greenville, S.C.)201470 pagesWINNER of the 2013 South Carolina Poetry Archives Book Prize(SCPA prize)

About Quitman Marshall

Born and raised in Columbia, SC, Quitman Marshall
lived in Barcelona, Spain, then D.C., Amherst, and New York City, before
returning to his home state in 1990. In Washington, where he received his M.A.
in literature at American University, he studied with Henry Taylor, Howard
Nemerov, and Doris Grumbach, in Amherst with James Tate, and in New York with
David Ignatow and Charles Simic. For most of the 1990's he coordinated the
Sundown Poetry Series at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, and then
was the founding coordinator of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA.
The latter presented renowned poets and writers to full houses in the Dock
Street Theater. He's a former chair of the Board of Governors of the SC Academy
of Authors and a founding board member of the SC Book Festival. His forthcoming
book of poems, YOU WERE BORN ONE TIME (96 Press, 2014), won the SC Poetry
Archives Book Prize in 2013. His chapbooks include THE BIRTH GIFT, 14th STREET,
and THE SLOW COMET. His manuscripts-in-process include WHEN THE BOAT MOVES
(poems), SWAMPITUDE (narrative), and THE BLOODY POINT (novel). He has taught
literature and writing to students at every level from elementary school to
college. In 1996 he won the Writers Exchange Award sponsored by Poets & Writers,
Inc. He moved to Paris in 1999, and since 2001 has lived in Beaufort, SC, with
his wife, Martine, and their three children.

From You Were Born One Time:Sliver

They were walking on the moon

when we came of age.Now look where we are.The stars look awfully crowdedup there, but I’m no judge of distances. From this pointin my life everything, like the timewe had or have together, seems very farfrom long enough. Tonight there is oneso thin it’s not even a sickle yetI can see the full moon waiting in shadow round behind it.What did we know when we exposedthat first sliver of ourselves?What did we claim to be or callthe light we lived and were lit for?It’s wide, what named and rounded usbefore we turned out this way.Civilization

The banks closed when I was a kid in Rome.Today, through the balcony Romanesque windows,into Carolina blue, as the preacher talkedabout the Pentecost, I wondered what I did.Somehow I paid my way into the Museo Vaticanoand touched a lot of marble I wasn’t supposedto touch, looked up with the world at the Sistine ceiling,watched black ants feed their tunnels under the Forum,and even chased a recommended cake to a certain grand café.Since then, in the piling up or vanishing of days,I’ve kept money in my pocket,been trusted by some to show up and failedthe trust of others. Sometimes I can’t believea moment like this until I taste the winein the glass you just gave me. It was all a gift, and, twenty-one, I took it. TodayI maybe want him back, the silent boywho since has touched exquisite flesh,but who really couldn’t tell me morethan the cardinal flaming there on the walkthat my daughter has just, with pride in her work, swept clean.Torture

Her blood is on my handwhere I gripped her slender leg,still warm, and dragged her from the road.It was night and her eyes still shonefutilely bright for the passing cars. Theycaught me, looking up as they werefrom her reclining, her eyes too lateto see or be seen except by me,who also gripped her other legnot yet wet from the bloodflooding where the whitetail of warning had been, her red lifenow painting the road behind.A night class had me driving homefrom students who’d fidgetedat the word “torture,” knowingone definition of the word,but nothing of its reach.

if ART Gallery is located at 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C. 29201. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 11 am to 7 pm. Saturday from 11am to 5pm. Contact if ART Gallery at (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351 or wroefs@sc.rr.com.